


when she turned into a star I swallowed her.

by basementmixtape



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Typical Shenanigans, F/F, Girls Kissing, Internalized Homophobia, Lesbians, Pining, Sexuality Crisis, Vegas Era, also adult boreo later on, because it’s theo decker, everyone else is the same gender, fem!AU, fem!Boris Pavlikovsky, fem!Theo Decker, kotku is actually a major character because i said so, theyre both girls
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:08:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22533742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basementmixtape/pseuds/basementmixtape
Summary: “I did not love women as I do now.I loved them with my eyes closed, my back turned.I loved them silent, & startled, & shy.”-When I Was Straight, Julie Marie WadeAU: Theodora “Theo” Decker in Vegas, New York, and beyond.
Relationships: Theo Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28





	when she turned into a star I swallowed her.

**Author's Note:**

> fic title is taken from the swan by ana božičević. 
> 
> chapter title/fic description is taken from when i was straight by julie marie wade.
> 
> inspired in part by the princess who never smiled by aurora_borealis.

Theodora Decker didn't know what she expected moving to a place like Las Vegas. Her father had dragged her there, not kicking and screaming, because Theo didn't do things like that, didn't make a big deal out of the shit that went wrong in her life, she didn't speak unless she was spoken too, she kept her best friend, Andy, so close she was certain their parents thought they'd end up married, friends of opposite sexes often faced gun-barrels labeled ' _Expectation_ ' and swallowed bullets labeled ' _Obligation_ ' and died tiny deaths for it every single day for the rest of their lives. But Theodora didn't complain. Theodora was a quiet girl, a nice girl, a smart girl. She wouldn't kick up a fuss over something as inconsequential as her own feelings.

"Theodora Decker, right?" Her English teacher grinned at her but he had dead eyes, like a shark, like some other predator, they were practically glazed over. He was looking at her long skirt and heather grey sweater like they were offensive, at her glasses like they were even worse. Men often looked at her like that. Like she was offending them by breathing.

"Just Theo." She said, feeling the eyes of the other teenagers in the class like a physical, disgusting thing, like something she'd have to scrub off of herself in the shower later. "No one calls me Theodora."

"Have a seat, get yourself settled in." He dismissed her, deeming her unworthy of attention just like every other person in Nevada. She slunk to the only empty seat in the room, right in the middle of it. Stage lights on her with their cool florescent glow, she was putting on a show for an audience of empty chairs, a theatre full of ghosts. It must have been a comedy. She could hear the laugh track looping like carnival music, laughing and laughing at a joke that had to be her.

She saw a girl two seats away, with wild curls and smeared makeup. Her eyes were sharp as knives, black as pitch, her chin resting in the palm of her hand, thin lips and sharpish teeth and a smile like a razor blade when she noticed Theo staring.

That girl haunted her all morning, her oversized blazer, the t-shirt under it with the collar cut out and the sleeves cut off, _Never Summer,_ some snow boarding thing altered into a tank top with uneven slashes. It made sense in the Vegas heat. Her huge coat didn't. Theo saw her again on the bus at the end of the day, her hair so long and ragged it probably hadn't been cut her whole life, the smell of cigarettes clinging to her like a cloud, brown eyes going light as honey in the sunlight. She practically fell into the seat beside her, boneless and graceless.

"You new or something, Princess?" Her accent was surprising, jarring and loud, foreign. She sounded Australian almost, but with a dark, Slavic undertone, a hollowness inside the bones of the words, birdlike and tiny just like her.

That wasn't quite true, she was tall, taller than Theo, but rail-thin, skinny and pale as a ghost.

"Fuck you." 

"Seriously, haven't seen you anywhere before. Where are you from?" The strange girl raised a dark eyebrow at her, not quite pretty but far closer to it than Theo had ever managed to get, and smiled wide.

"New York." A little head tilt, an acknowledgment: _very cool._ She wasn't sure why she wanted to impress this odd stranger, but she did, and she always would, probably. Theo felt drawn to this girl with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and hair so long it must get caught on her belt. "What about you?"

"I have lived everywhere, all over, really. You are Theodora, yes?" She said it strangely, not quite getting the letters in the same place _Fyodora_ , not _Theodora_.

"Theo, no one calls me by my full name." The girl's expression twisted.

"Theo is too boyish, doesn't suit you, you are too pretty to be called Theo." She didn't say that right either, a darkness to that as well, a strangeness, a hollowness. _Tey-oh_.

"I'm not pretty." And she really, really wasn't. She was too skinny, her hair a dirty shade of blonde, perpetually tangled, her nose too big, her glasses strange for the shape of her face, her eyes too large, her lips too thin and colourless. She looked like a Theo. Almost like a boy, if she wasn't wearing skirts all the time people would probably mistake her for one.

"I think you are." The girl smiled, and Theo wished she could believe her. She knew she wasn't exactly ugly, but she wasn't pretty by any stretch of the imagination, to think otherwise would be foolish. She had never been pretty. She would never be pretty.

"What's your name?"

"Doris."

"Like Doris Day?" Doris shrugged, a strangeness to that too, everything about her was strange.

"Don't know. Why is it Americans think everyone knows all of their big stars, all of their little nonsense things? No other country I have lived in is so self-centred. Is like entire world must revolve around American things of it doesn't matter to any of you." She threw her head back against the seat, then jerked to life again, animated and loud and alive and all the things Theo knew she could never be. "My stop is next, you should come to mine, I have beer, we could watch movies." Theo thought of her empty home, a doll house where she could play perfect daughter, play quiet and not quite pretty and read in her bedroom alone while her father and Xandra, who the fuck named their child Xandra? lived out in the real world.

"Okay."

If either of them had lived in even half-way normal households, with curfews and chores and adult supervision, they wouldn't have become quite so inseparable so fast. As it was, Theo and Doris were practically joined at the hip after that first night, stumbling through the desert together with smoke on their lips and liquor in their bellies. They whispered secrets to each other, shouted curses in four different tongues, traded insults and harsh touches, traded silent solidarity and sharp smiles.

Theo led Doris to her house for the first time, the sky wide and white above them. There never seemed to be any colour in Vegas, not when you left the strip, it was like the entire world had been wrung dry to give the neon city its colour, like the entire world had been caked in flour and left to cook into nothing but dust. Theo felt like she had become colourless here too, Doris and her umbrella kept both of them from getting a tan under the sunlight, bleached pale and wrung thin, both of them with tiny breasts and concave stomachs and ribs so prominent you could count them the whole way up. They were skeletons, nothing but bones, hollow like birds, like Doris's voice sober, like her fathers eyes and the empty place her heart used to beat inside of her chest. They went inside, laughing, Doris leaving her umbrella by the door, opening her bag while they wandered into the kitchen. She tossed her oversized coat aside, left in a tiny black shirt and fishnets she'd stolen at the mall under a skirt she'd stolen from Theo, dark red fake velvet, far shorter on Doris, on her long, pale legs.

"You didn't tell me you have a dog!" Popper jolted to life like he'd been electrocuted, barking madly and darting between her legs, jumping at her. She fell to her knees, immediately grinning and petting him in the strange, aggressive way she did almost anything, scratching his ears, down his back, pulling him into her lap. "Oh, hello little man, what a good boy, perfect gentleman for our Princess, yes?" She looked at Theo, raising her eyebrows. "What is his name?"

"Popper."

"Oh little _Popchyshka_! Popchyk, what a good boy you are, little pops is right, good boy, good boy..." Theo grabbed " _Xandra's_ " vodka from the freezer and swallowed a fiery mouthful, then another, offering the bottle to Doris half-heartedly. She grabbed it from her, swallowing at least three shots before she gave it back, hardly flinching at the ugly taste of it. They passed it back and forth until it was half empty, Doris entertaining herself with Popper on the floor, crosslegged, both of them ecstatic to have made a new friend. Eventually the two of them staggered out of the living room, heading up the stairs to Theo's empty bedroom, the bleak white walls, the pale blue blankets, her clothes still in her suitcase a month after her arrival.

"Come on, Princess, let me do your makeup." Her eyes were shining in the way they only did when she was magnificently drunk.

"What?"

"Just for fun! I won't make you look silly, Princess, I promise." Theo looked at the bag in her hands, at the freckles on her cheeks hidden by smears of messy eyeliner, at her mouth coated in wine coloured lipstick, and nodded carefully. "Yes! I know you have it in your heart that you are not pretty, but you have such a perfect face, so sweet and soft and beautiful," She felt her cheeks get hot, listening to Doris lie about her was harder than usual when she was pulling her into her bed, crawling into her lap. "Your eyes are lighter than mine, grey and blue, striking. Strong eyes. You'll look so pretty in makeup." She took out eyeshadow and put on a layer of red and coppery orange around Theo's eyes, putting eyeliner on her so carefully, tongue between her teeth. She put a little bit of blush on her cheeks, blowing on her eyelids to get the extra makeup off. Theo couldn't stop looking at her, the way her dark eyebrows lifted and lowered while she put Theo together and took her apart, gentle motions of an eyeshadow brush, none of her usual violence present when they touched.

Theo looked down, and Doris tilted her chin upward, holding a little black cylinder in her pale hand.

"So beautiful." Theo felt her cheeks flood with heat. Doris ghosted a thumb over her bottom lip, a trail of fire following her touch. "Open your mouth." Theo's lips parted, and Doris coated them in a smooth layer of velvety red lipstick. She didn't even pause, sliding the tube of lipstick closed, shoving it in her makeup bag, and slipping her index finger past Theo's lips. "So it doesn't get on your teeth."

She knew her entire face had to be blazing crimson, Doris left her finger in her mouth a little too long, looking at her with intense dark eyes, titling her head a little, her red mouth curling into a sharp smile. She took her finger away, but she didn't move, staring at Theo like she really was beautiful, like she actually believed all the things she said about her, that she was pretty, that her face was sweet, that she thought she looked nice with makeup on. Doris leaned in closer, twisting a strand of dirty blonde hair around her finger.

"Your hair is so straight, like a ruler." She tucked the hair she'd been playing with behind Theo's ear, a ring of red around her finger. "It suits you, mine is always so difficult, so much hair, yes?" She did have a lot of hair, tons of it, in fact.

"I like your hair," Theo reached for her, trailing a hand from her scalp all the way to the ragged ends of her curls, frizzy and witch-like but still as pretty as everything else about her was coming to be. She leaned into the touch, a small smile, strangely soft, spreading over her mouth. "It's pretty." Theo realized she'd been staring at her lips, and quickly looked back at her eyes.

"Have you ever kissed a girl before, Princess?"

"No."

"Do you want to?" Theo just looked at her, suddenly breathless, her dark eyes, her red mouth, grabbed a handful of curls at the base of her skull, and pulled their lips together.

It wasn't quite like anything Theo had ever done before. She'd kissed two boys, Andy, a sweet little kiss on the mouth in the first grade, and Tom Cable, both of them nervous and fumbling, he'd been all tongue and very little else. Kissing Doris was different. She was tender, soft lips on lips, close-mouthed kisses, a hand cradling her jaw, long, skinny fingers, a whispering touch of tongue, a careful grip on her wrist. Doris shifted, climbing properly into Theo's lap, legs splayed over her hips, her skirt spread wide. Kissing her was like kissing summer, soft and warm, careful and sweet, the taste of her lipstick like blood in her mouth.

Theo leaned away, and whispered her name, and it sounded so raw she wished she knew how to pull it back into her mouth. Doris kissed her again, and again, and again, and again, over and over and over, pressing her against the twin-sized mattress in her bedroom, hands shaky, eyes glassy with drink. Her breath tasted like vodka, like lipstick and something underneath all of it, a human, unnamable taste that was more of a feeling, the warmth of her tongue in her mouth, sliding against her own. She could feel the weight of her tiny body on hers, pulling her down and down and down, if this was a stage show the empty chairs would be weeping, the laugh track would cut to silence and the curtains would close and they would wake up content and warm in each other’s arms.

As it was, they woke up hungover and shirtless, lipstick smeared around their mouths, down their chests, on their necks and shoulders. Theo had never kissed a girl. Theo would never kiss a girl again. Theo didn’t know what she had expected moving to a place like Las Vegas, but it definitely wasn’t this.

**Author's Note:**

> i wanted to write about lesbians and i also wanted to write about the goldfinch so here we are. 
> 
> i hope you enjoyed! kudos and comments are greatly appreciated :)


End file.
